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- "Andor" and "The Rehearsal" Pump Up the Volume
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Andor and The Rehearsal Pump Up the Volume
What TV are you folks watching lately? Write in your recommendations! I love to hear what people are into. Email them to [email protected]!
What am I watching, you (probably didn’t) ask? Well two specific shows are top of my list right now, and they have something very interesting in common! I’m super into Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal on HBO…
…and Tony Gilroy’s Andor, on Disney+
You might ask yourself, what could these two disparate shows share (besides being enjoyed by one weird guy)? To which I respond: HEY! These shows are enjoyed by many weird guys!
The other thing these otherwise very different TV programs have in common is their innovative usages of LED walls to achieve their specific special effect needs. Most people are aware of ILM’s StageCraft technology, often referred to as “the Volume.”
The Volume was initially developed for a different Star Wars show: The Mandalorian, and has been used across numerous TV shows and movies listed on its Wikipedia. It’s pretty handy!
However, like with all movie technology, use can become overuse, and over the years of its utilization in TV and movie productions, relying on an LED wall can become a crutch:
Most StageCraft footage has a bland color palette. Nothing feels natural; the sunlight is artificial. This technology was developed as an alternative to greenscreens, but it ultimately suffers from the same problem: flat, lifeless visuals. The Volume allows the actors to react to the environments their characters are in, because the CG is already being projected where there used to just be matte green. But it makes very little difference to the audience – StageCraft footage still looks just as fake as greenscreen footage.
Enter Andor. Unlike other Star Wars productions, Andor shoots mostly on practical sets. It does use the Volume, but for a slightly different purpose, as explained to SlashFilm by Andor VFX producer TJ Falls:
We built a specific LED screen around the embassy where [one of the characters] works, and so they're having their party and you've got wonderful screens. And it's like, well, now we've got a wonderfully practically built set. We're immersed with our environment of people, we're utilizing new technology in terms of StageCraft and blending everything together.
This is one of the many elements that sets Andor apart from other Star Wars shows. It feels grounded and real, even though it’s set in a galaxy far, far away. The technology is used to augment the reality instead of replacing it. There’s no distance between the actors and the world. They are there together.
The Rehearsal also uses LED walls (although I’m unclear if it’s StageCraft or not), but for a very different reason:
In Season 2… it [opens] with a detailed recreation of a cockpit as a co-pilot (Eric Barron) fails to convince his pilot (Gregory Gast) to break off a landing approach that feels all wrong. A slightly jittery camera bouncing between close and medium shots of the pilots and an earnest, slightly mournful score add to the mounting tension. This is as serious as any film would take a plane crash in the moments before it happens.
But in the resulting crash, as flames burst all around and the pilot’s bodies go limp, the camera in the cockpit finds Fielder, standing against the conflagration. We see that we are, in fact, on a soundstage, surrounded by an LED wall; then, in a wider shot, Fielder walks away from the cockpit set. Whether or not a viewer laughs at the moment — the inevitable intrusion of Fielder himself into the world he’s created — is between them and God. But this reveal is a masterful evolution of the ways in which “The Rehearsal” complicates our understanding of what we’re watching by showing us the artificial seams of how it’s being made.
This is the value of tech in storytelling: augmenting the artistic work in a way that deepens it. This is why I continue to be fairly skeptical of claims that generative AI will serve as any sort of long-lasting replacement for movies or TV: tech never ends up fully replacing human creativity.
Will ChatGPT Eat Our Brains?
Now, granting what I said above about generative AI not replacing human creativity in the realm of TV and movies, gen-AI might very well have a much more significant concerning effect on humanity’s ability to be creative. That’s the underlying thesis of New York Magazine’s blockbuster article “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.”
Students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.
Scary stuff! What’s the point of taking classes if you’re just going to plug everything into ChatGPT? As many online pointed out, this is an inevitable end product of turning college into a checkbox for getting a job, instead of institutions to learn for learning’s sake. How do we fix this? I have no idea!
I do tend to be on the bearish side and agree with commentators like Ed Zitron, who is convinced we are inside a giant hype bubble around AI that’s on its way to bursting.
What happens when you’re outsourced all of your brain’s thinking to AI, and then AI becomes prohibitively expensive for you to use? I’m scared to learn the answer!
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
How are tariff worries impacting the Cannes Market? (link)
The key for advertisers to reach Gen Alpha? Video games. (link)
How AI might be behind the firing of the copyright register. (link)